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So GW has kinda pissed me off of late. Their limp, unexciting releases, stirring around with problems with the rules while not actually addressing the root causes, just trying to patch over the problems. Despite the fact that they are WAY better than they’ve ever been in a lot of ways, I just don’t feel like giving them money. Especially when I have NO idea just what the heck will happen to Dark Angels (or any non-ultramarine chapters).

So I need to find something new.

Hey! Look! Frogs in Funny Hats!

So I’ve started Napoleonics. I’ve got the wonderful AB line of 18mm miniatures, and am planning an 1809 Army Corps from the big war with Austria. I’m looking at two rule sets, Fields of Glory: Napoleonic, a more competitively oriented ruleset currently being re-written down in Oz and VERY near publication, and General d’Armee, a ruleset that’s more detail oriented and narrative in scope from what I’ve seen. My area does have a historical group, they play a lot of games in the same basement where I first rolled dice in fact. But I won’t be playing games anytime soon, building a new army takes time, and basing these and going back to paint later just isn’t practical, so I’m going to do something I rarely do, take my time, work through my pile of shame.

And what a pile it is!

So I’m going to talk a bit about what’s going on here. These figures don’t go one to a base, they go on in small units. Painting them lose is… well… not happening, so I attach them to dense cardboard so that I can paint them without going crazy. Er. Crazier.

Next I’m let’s talk about what’s in the picture, bottom to top.

Two 12 lb cannons. French Heavy Artillery

12 French Dragoons. French Heavy Cavalry

24 Voltigeurs. French Light Infantry,

12 Horses. 4 legs, eat a lot, die if you look at them funny it seems.

24 Line Infantry, 8 artillery crew.

So this is 82 figures, and costs around 70 bucks. Compare that to a 40k army and you see some of the appeal. In Fields of Glory this is between 25% and 33% of an army.

There’s some odds and ends missing but again, in Fields of Glory this is a brigade each of Line Infantry, Light Infantry, Heavy Cavalry, and Heavy Artillery, without any attachments or officers. This would be a pretty substantial mixed division, although not one that would be legal for an 1809 French Army. So let’s see what all I’ve gotten done!

All Painted!

Glued to their Bases, Primaris Intercessor for scale

Based… With the wrong flocking

21e Regiment de Dragons. Haven’t painted horses in 15 years

This week I’m finishing the Dragoons, probably with the 11e Regiment. Green collars and Red turnbacks.

Time permitting I’ll work on the artillery and knock them out as the uniforms aren’t terribly complicated and there’s only 8 of them and 2 guns. After that it’s the light infantry and then, round one is done. Next will be some light cavalry, officers, and aides de camp.

One of the things I like a lot about historicals is I can do a unit in a week with enough dedication without too much trouble. Even at a slower rate of one every other week it’s not awful. A typical army will have between 8 and 16 units in FOG:N. The one I’ve penciled in has 11 brigades, 5 attachments (single stands that go with other units) 3 division commanders, a corps commander, and 5 aides de camp. That’s roughly equivalent to 13 units, of which I’ve nearly got 2 done. I could have it done (money and time permitting) by New Years, and certainly by my birthday.

Which leaves the “then what” and, well, there’s a couple options, first is playing with the established group, which is infrequent and a good drive away, there’s playing with local players who haven’t started yet, some locals do have armies from before coming to my area, so starting a club shouldn’t be too hard. Of course there’s also the major cons, which would be VERY nice to attend should I get the option.

Next week look forward to the rest of the dragoons and maybe some redlegs! Who won’t have red legs because the general in favor of that uniform lost. Probably why they lost the war.

A little bit past the 3 color standard. There’s a lot of touch up to do but it shouldn’t take too long. Getting the wings to stay on should be an ongoing challenge.

This guy came out well. His sword arm wouldn’t come off so painting his chest wasn’t the easiest. Also one of his shoulder pads was primed black and every other model in the squad primed white so he will probably get a lot of touch up to balance that out.

I love this guy’s post. And I hope I can get that grate off the base so I can base him properly…

You’ve met the sarge

Old breastplate, Good pose, and will be easy to base. The only down side to this guy is he faces “down” a bit more than I’d like.

I need to turn his head. Iconography came out real well.

I’m torn about highlighting these guys the way I did the others. I know I need to do a little but their base color is much brighter than the rest of the troops and I don’t want to make them insanely bright. Their details are well picked out already in normal lighting and unlike the Mk III armored troops who look really boring, these guys are very dynamic and interesting without the TRON highlights.

OH and you don’t get views of the back because I need to add fire effects. Next week I might do a character, I might finish the land raider. It’s a BUSY week. The week following I’m planning on doing Inceptors.

Pretty sure I’ve used that title before. Getting back into 40k. Currently it seems like the Dark Angels I’ve been fiddling with for a while will be fun. Getting used to detachments will take time, and currently I have a big enough grey horde to make Leman Russ jealous, but I think I can manage that.

Also working on D’s Eldar. We have her up to around 1k points. Almost exactly 1k actually and with a pretty clear path to 2k. It’s interesting and educational to see how things look from the standpoint of another codex. It’s also eye opening to realize just how glaring many weaknesses are. Try finding anti-air in a Dark Angels list. Eldar may not be great but they at least have a little. DA? Woof. Monstrous creatures? Does a Land Raider count? Not saying DA is weak, it has a lot of 2+, great bikes. Really great bikes. REALLY REALLY great bikes. And T5 is pretty good in the current meta.

So I’m going to try to necro this blog with a bit more hobby flair. Alternating between a meta/battle report post, a hobby post, and some fluff fiction fun from my battle company. And I need VERY little in the way of additional troops to get the whole battle company on the field. Mostly assault marines. I think I’m 15 assault marines and 4 heavy weapons from having a full battle company; but which one do I make.

Not doin it!

So, 3rd or 5th? I can do 5th very easily just doing the slash across the shoulder plate and knee pads, but with my planned lists almost always having (very, very good) bikes, and terminators… It’ll be nice to have all the colors mixed in on my tac squads. So…. probably doing 5th. Still leaving 3rd open as an option though.

One of the things I like about the detachments is it lets you take org charts like that one above, and put it into an actual army list. I can build a Lion’s Blade Demi Company that splits a Battle Company right down the middle. Double up on that, add a Ravenwing support team to one half, a Deathwing support detachment to the other and you have a REALLY fun, neat army that has a full battle company at its core. So right now I’m looking at that. Here’s the list I’m looking at now. Priorities are: Transport for the 3rd tac squad, possible weapons changes for the termies.

So I’ve never hidden the fact that I really, REALLY hate tournaments in tabletop games. With a blinding passion. It keeps me up at night. It forces good games into “metas” that leech the fun out of the game. In my area, Warmachine / Hordes tourneys dominate the scene so much that finding a good casual game takes herculean efforts. Recently I’ve noticed X-Wing has become rather toxic at times. Fortunately it hasn’t taken hold in my local area but some of the things you see online. Well. Let’s look at this:

The short version is that there’s a lot of situations at X-Wing tournaments where an intentional draw is to the advantage of both players, and tournament mechanics combined with how FFG has enforced certain wordings has encouraged it.

The short, short version is that people are being rewarded to not play the game.

Now I don’t like games getting to the point where people play ultra competitive, soul crushing lists that don’t bring much fun to the game. Where they rules lawyer every point bringing in every observer to haggle over the tenth of an inch long after the fun has been sucked away, beaten, dissected, dried up, turned to ash and blown away. Even by that standard this is farcical. People can gain an advantage by NOT PLAYING and this hasn’t even been responded to?

I play games for enjoyment. The only FFG tourney I attended I ended up taking home cards. After edging out a win in one match and getting WHOMPED in the second. And I’m fine with that. I love showing up on nights and playing a couple casual games where people are trying out fun and interesting lists. Right now even with tourneys all over X-Wing is in a decent place meta-wise. The new wave has shaken things up and while regionals are up, as well as a charity tourney this weekend, people are flying some interesting stuff.

This isn’t affecting me directly. I can avoid the LGS on tourney prep nights and during tourneys. I like playing a couple games a month and weekly play is on tap here, but just knowing this mindset exists is deeply disturbing, and hearing that FFG has even condoned it (hopefully only as a mistake) also disturbs me.

Strangely, the game that seems least affected by all this is 40k. I know that there is a tourney scene, but you see more leagues than tourneys, partially due to the epically long games that any GW product can generate. 40k and Games Workshop in general is in pretty poor condition, but hey, they don’t have to worry about ugly tourney scenes. Which is nice.

To wrap up this messy post; tourneys can take a fun game and turn it into a competitive mess. X-Wing has pretty good meta management, but letting this intentional draw foolishness go on really damages the brand.

So the Core Set in Armada is pretty darn deep. It’s got a lot of layers and interactions that really push my expectations for a “core” set. Today I will write a bit about each ship and one upgrade for it that affects how it plays, as well as the two fleet commanders.

Victory Class Star Destroyer – I want to call it the cheese wedge but that might be a bit pejorative. In the learn to play scenario it gets handled pretty rough but at 180 points things are a lot more even and this ship thrives. It pushes a huge wedge of fear in front of it, about 120 degrees of hate. Even its broadsides can cripple a corvette, especially if it took hits on the way in. Adding the Enhanced Armament card gives it a massive broadside that will really force the rebels to step carefully even when flanking you. The gunnery team just adds insult to injury by letting you fire from the same zone twice, albeit at a different target. Both variants are nasty, and the squashed nature of the blue band makes the Victory I a really intriguing choice, especially with the assault missiles.

TIE Fighter – I like to call this a Space Inferiority Fighter. The goal isn’t to dominate the fighter battle, it’s to prevent the enemy from capitalizing on his dominance. These fighters will quickly get hacked from space, and while they might do as much damage as they take, they cannot take as much. Their role is to protect and pounce on mistakes and that’s all.

Howlrunner – This is a real interesting card. The way I’m reading it she doesn’t boost herself, and X-Wings likely have enough firepower to cancel her birthday real fast, so she really is best used sitting at range 1 from a blob of ordinary TIEs turning them into really nasty heavy hitters. 4 blue dice with a re-roll can wreck things.

Grand Moff Tarkin – Or as I call him, Grand Moff Token. In a 180 point battle with one VSD he seems priced right at 38 points (a Corvette is 39) put three or four Imperial ships on the battle and he’s a freaking steal. He gives so much flexibility to the Imperials that it’s insane. Look Motti and Screed look good, but Tarkin has it all over them. The Imperials don’t need to be tougher, or hit harder, they need to be able to make small adjustments that they couldn’t predict three turns out.

Nebulon B Frigate – At first I was really not feeling this ship. It seemed like neither one nor the other. I was half right. It is neither one nor the other, it can’t brawl, it can’t snipe, but it can fence. It has enough speed that it has to be respected, it has enough toughness that it can’t be alpha’d off the field (without a LOT of luck and poor management) and it can keep up the pressure with guns, fighters, and provide a healthy bit of support. The upgrades here are all about the engineering team and Redemption title. That’s a lot of engineering. Your tokens are now worth 3 (can heal a hull point!) and the dial command can repair a shield, and repair a hull point. That’s a LOT of fixing. I’m not nearly as big a fan of the support version as the Escort variant. 6 points is not nearly enough for the lost anti fighter weaponry and losing control of a squadron as well.

CR90 Corvette – At first this ship seemed like a beast. Cheap, blindingly fast, hard hitting, and it appeared fairly tough. Until I compared it to the standard that mattered, the firepower of a VSD. It can be alpha’d off the table even in the side arcs, and two rounds of fire will be enough to crush it. You have to maneuver it perfectly to get the most out of it and I haven’t gotten the trick down yet. Even getting into the rear arc doesn’t help much as I tend to go whizzing out of it the next turn. That being said I have some ideas to put into play next time and we will see if I can get the hang of this mean little bastard. Princess Leia is going to spend a lot of times hanging out on these little buggers. They pick their command right at the start of the turn, and she can send it to one other ship. Your Nebulon B needs to repair RIGHT FRIGGING NOW? Leia’s on it! Time to ensure you’ve got the firepower to crack that VSF? Leia’s your gal. Of course she’s a bit of a fire magnet so even though Electronic Countermeasures is expensive, it allows you to use that key Evasive card all the time, or ensure that you have Redirect when you eat that big shot at range one.

X-Wing – A real qualitative difference between the Rebellion and the Empire right here. This fighter can win the Starfighter battle and carry through to do something useful with it. Slower, Tougher, Harder Hitting, and MUCH more effective against starships this ship makes TIEs cry in the corner even costing more than 1.5x the TIEs cost.

Luke Skywalker – Nasty little bastard he is. Underestimate him you should not. His black dice when attacking large targets and ability to skip capital ship shields moves this squadron firmly into the “bomber” column. Sure he can wallop TIEs as well as another X-Wing but you really want him dropping crits onto capital ships…

General Dodonna – … And this is why Dodonna has one of those “Wombo Combo” abilities. This conniving bastard lets you turn over the top 4 damage cards WHENEVER you deal a face up damage card to an enemy and then pick which one to inflict. Look the crits in this game are downright nasty, this card means you can REALLY ensure you get something your opponent will hate when you score one. On turn 2. Against a fully shielded VSD. With Luke (Or with Dodonna’s Pride).

This is just a taste of the tactical depth this game has. There’s other combos already possible that are just nasty, and looking ahead at the spoilers shown on boardgamegeek I can see even more that I’ll be using (I’m looking at you Yavaris and Adar Tallon, and Raymus Antilles, and Garm bel Iblis)

So I just got back from the LGS where I played several games of Armada. So far I’ve only played as the Rebel Alliance and I doubt I’d have much interest in playing the Imperials so that suits me. Even if the Imperials do suit my “Subtle is a smaller sledgehammer to the face right?” mentality. First I’m going to talk about how the game plays, then I’m going to run through how I feel about these decisions and mechanics.

How it Plays

So the basic mechanics of the game are, you set everything up, including your stack of commands, your ships, your fighters, your defense tokens, your turn marker, your initiative marker, your scenery, your deployment markers, everything. Each turn you flip over the top marker in your command stack (on subsequent turns you pick a new command to go on the bottom) and start activating your ships. When you reveal a command you can choose to convert it into a token that has less power than the command dial but can be banked up and spent later, a ship can bank up as many tokens as it has command points. This gives large, lumbering ships some flexibility by letting them store more tokens, at the cost of having a lower chance of having a useful dial command on any given turn.

Large ships activate alternately, with the ship activating, then moving, and special commands being used throughout the turn. This can give you some interesting combinations. Longer ranged ships can activate earlier in the turn without issue, closer ranged ships like to activate later to increase the chance of getting shots in. Ships then move in a more flexible manner than in X-Wing, you don’t commit to a move until you’ve had a lot of time to measure and prepare (outside of tournaments) and ships like the CR-90 Corvette can really dance around the field. Both firing resolution and movement resolution are very simple, without the opposed dice rolls, and reactions, and re-rolls that can drag out the X-Wing sequence, there’s a roll, a defensive reaction, MAYBE a re-roll, and move on. Just simplifying a step makes life a lot easier.

During large ship activation you can use dial commands or tokens. These use the same icons but commands are better than tokens. For example the Concentrate Firepower command gives you an extra dice, the token gives you a re-roll. The squadron one is where the game gets interesting. An Escort Frigate has a squadron value of 2. This means that it can activate 2 squadrons with the command, or 1 without. Those squadrons can move and shoot, or shoot and move, during the frigates activation. Quite spicy. The other commands let it repair or manage damage, or adjust it’s speed and maneuver batter. This is the only way to change speed without upgrade cards.

Fighters that aren’t activated by large ships activate at the end of the turn. They can move or shoot. This severely limits their ability to engage the enemy, though depending on their role it lets them still contribute. Fighters can roll a lot of dice against other fighters but generally only roll one dice against capital ships and only hits count (hits and criticals if you are a bomber, which the X-Wing is). Fighter Squadrons are highly specialized and the Ace squadrons are even more so. Luke Skywalker can skip shields and start chipping away at a ships hull right away, Howlrunner makes other fighters do even more damage just by being there.

Fleet building is an interesting challenge. There’s a couple of real wombo-combos so far, Grand Moff Token… erm… Tarkin leads the pack by handing out tokens each turn to his ships. The Rebels can build lots of crit combos around their ships using Dodonna’s ability to select a certain critical hit out of four whenever one is played. This can be brutal as critical hits are just that, critical. They do immediate and sometimes catastrophic damage to a ship. Others can give ships added capability, like additional attack dice, or special abilities on crits. There’s already a lot of depth in the game even with just the starter set, once Wave 1 arrives at the end of next month things might get silly.

This would be a lot better for me if the Corvette hadn’t gone from out of range to here in one turn. It died shortly thereafter.

My Reactions

Ok, this game has a LOT more depth to it than X-Wing. Movement is more fluid, damage resolution is quicker, but turns are longer as there’s a lot of measuring, planning and thinking going on. Ship movement is neat. Having to plan on firing before you move is awkward, and it’s meant to be. I like the mechanic but it is going to take a LOT of getting used to. As a Rebel player I had a lot of trouble getting both my ships in range to do something in the same turn. I expect this to be somewhat easier as the games get bigger, 2 on 1 matches are a bit rough as I have to move a ship that is dealing with the only Imperial ship on the table.

Firing resolution is very fast, as it should be. Once an attack is planned, executing it shouldn’t be a huge to do, and sometimes in X-Wing it felt like it was with dice being modified, re rolled, etc, to what felt like an excessive extent. While that CAN happen in this game, it isn’t the norm. Yet anyway.

The integration of fighters into a battle is going to be a very interesting thing to watch. I love fighters and I plan on using them heavily in a fleet, having to use a fighter command to get the most out of them is a REALLY neat idea, with the current lack of dedicated carriers and general dearth of them in the Star Wars canon it ought to be interesting to see how this plays out. There’s a lot of things you want capital ships to do and purely shepherding fighters isn’t always one of them, of course once a fighter gets into combat it can generally be left alone. Another neat mechanic is how fighters engage each other. Once fighters are in range they lock up and must shoot at each other, they cannot move. This means that one sacrificial lamb can jump into a throng of enemy fighters and tie down the whole striker force. Tie being the operative word, at 8 points each a TIE squadron can very easily tie up many more points of Rebel fighters on a key turn. Pre-empting this will be a major tactic in getting your own bombers onto the target. Of course that means you have to spend your precious fighter activations on your interceptor to get it there. See what I mean when it comes to complexity?

Movement is what this game turns on. Having to fire, then move means you HAVE to think a turn ahead, and having to move first can mean getting hit on the chin at times. I don’t think it will be quite as extreme once wave 1 comes out but there were times when I had ships roll into range and get alpha’d by a well prepared Victory I. That hurts.

The turn before the previous pic. That’s how fast movement can be.

The gameplay is fun, it feels faster than it is, this game is an hour-eater. It has the flow and scope of the kind of epic battles you see in the movies, and it’s easy for me to see what I’m looking forward to and what I’m worried about. I’m looking forward to big battles with lots of ships zooming about, pounding each other while wings of fighters slash and fence between them. Escorts charge in to harass major ships, while the big brutes hammer each other, ocasionally venting their wrath at an escort that has drifted out of place.

What I worry about is people saying “Ok, for 400 points I can build a mammoth ISD, park it in a corner for 5 turns, vaporise anyone with the temerity to come near me and have enough fighters and fast escorts to nip out on the last turn and deal with any pesky objectives”. Currently most of the ridiculous combos are offensive, and make demolishing ships easier, not harder, but it only takes one wonky card to tilt the balance and that is a worry I have for the game, especially with even bigger, harder to kill ships on the way.

Still the gameplay is excellent, engaging, fun and did not disappoint. 10/10 for gameplay, 8/10 for box contents.

Fantasy Flight Games has finally released Star Wars Armada. The game that lets you put Star Destroyers against Rebel Cruisers (This summer, because those are in Wave 2, and Wave 1 isn’t even out yet).

Fantasy Flight Games does brilliant, fun, well designed games. The rules are clean, the models are attractive, the systems they are built on are balanced and well thought out. Star Wars Armada is more of the same, and at the same time is STILL a unique, and different game from X-Wing.

Anyway let’s talk about the box. The box is big, heavy and loaded. Containing 10 squadrons of fighters (3 ships in each, 6 TIE-ln squadrons and 4 X-Wing squadrons) a CR90 Corvette, A Nebulon B Frigate, and a Victory class Star Destroyer. None of these are front line starships for any of the combatants, but they each have their own unique role. The models are a bit of a mixed bag. At one end you have the Star Destroyer which is an impressive slab, well shaded and attractive, with lots of detail, and the CR90 which is one of THE iconic ships of the franchise, looking sleek and potent. At the other end the fighters look more like ordinary game tokens and the Frigate’s paint job is… amateurish. There’s a good chance it’s getting re done. None of them are necessarily bad but the fighters and frigate are disappointing, even though they are more than serviceable for gameplay.

The rest of the box is a cornucopia of goodies. A movement tool that looks like it might have started off in the dentists office, enough counters to play any four games I ever played growing up, objectives, ship data cards, damage cards, upgrades, identification cards, and of course the obligatory Range Ruler and Fantasy Flight Proprietary Dice Set.

The ONLY thing I don’t like is the dice set. Look Fantasy Flight, I get it. You can sell dice and make a mint. I own your app already, I’m good. JEBUS am I getting tired of each and every game having a new dice set. I love the games, but man learning to read new dice every time is annoying.

The rest is very high quality thick cardboard, good cardstock and the parts that require assembly (shield counters, speed counters and command counters) fit together fast and intuitively.

I haven’t played a game yet, but you can tell at a glance that it will run longer than X-Wing. Tournaments double the time of a game in the current rules, and I expect things will be frantic in that time frame. I would expect casual games to take 2-3 times as long, especially with the amount of pre-measuring that is allowed. My first impression is this is a fantastic game if you are interested in this scale of combat, and in battles that require development and strategy. Currently it loses a point for some of the models being a bit less than expected, and for the proprietary dice.

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